Storm of hoaxes spreads alarm, impedes work

Arab schoolchildren in Jersey City told their classmates ahead of time that the World Trade Center would be attacked. The water supply is poisoned. A police officer surfed a wave of rubble down 82 floors and lived. A mental patient escaped from confinement and clambered atop the mountain of debris, where he was arrested without clothes. The CIA knew.

The tragedy and tumult of the World Trade Center disaster Sept. 11 is spinning off waves of rumors and misinformation, from the mundane to the ridiculous, from the fantastic to the sad. Born out of chaos and sent speeding along by gossip and e-mail, the new urban legends are throwing up false hopes to the needy, diversions to the melancholy and roadblocks to the rescuers. The news often reports them, the Internet repeats them, and before long the wackiest theories seem plausible.

"We spend part of every day chasing down these rumors," said Francis McCarton, spokesman for the city's emergency management office. "People found alive in the rubble. They found the black boxes. The 10-foot piece of fuselage. We're trying to slow things down."

Some of the sham reports carry a sheen of officialdom so seemingly credible that they are difficult to ignore. Take, for instance, the e-mail message sent to hundreds of people last week claiming that the city's water supply might be poisoned.

"Many people I know have received this information from different sources so I don't think it's a hoax," went the note, signed by "Kelly" and forwarded innumerable times.

"We just received some off the record information from a VERY reputable source who is briefed daily, that there may be other attacks this weekend."

It didn't happen. Charles Sturcken, chief of staff for the city Department of Environmental Protection, said officials never received any such threats, but they did get numerous phone calls from alarmed citizens who had seen the message. The reality: The city has closed its 19 reservoirs, intensified security and stepped up testing of water, Sturcken said.

Rumors and conspiracy theories are a regular attendant to the aftermath of calamities. After Hurricane Andrew hit Miami in 1992, for instance, many people reported that officials were secretly stockpiling bodies in order to keep the death count low and quell public panic.

No such bodies were ever found.

After the catastrophic earthquake in Turkey two years ago, relatives of victims often pleaded with rescuers, telling them that they had heard the desperate call of a family member from deep inside the rubble. They were almost always mistaken.

Unconfirmed reports began swarming in the first chaotic moments after the attack: Eight planes had been hijacked, not four; one hijacked plane was shot down by a U.S. fighter jet; the Capitol was hit; there was a fire on the Mall in Washington.

Since then, the rumors have continued as regularly as the news. A subway car is packed with bodies. A stewardess from one of the hijacked planes has been found, strapped to her seat and handcuffed.

The most persistent stories have been of people alive in the ruins. Two days after the attack, several government officials reported that five New York City firefighters, stranded together in an sport-utility vehicle, had been rescued from the rubble. In reality, it turned out that a group of rescue workers had been pulled from the ruins, but only moments after they had fallen into a crevice that day.

As for trapped people calling from their cell phones, the truth is similarly murky. Despite several unconfirmed reports, there is still little hard evidence that anyone used a phone to dial out of the rubble.

"We can't confirm if any calls came out after the buildings collapsed," said Ritch Blasi, a spokesman for AT&T Wireless.